AMADEO HADN’T EXPECTED FEAR, but here it is, hammering in his heart. What he sees from up here are eyes, and though he knows these people, knows all their names, they are like the eyes of strangers. He sees the back of Manuel’s head and knows that the old man won’t turn around. He seeks Angel with his gaze, and when he finds her he rests there. He leans into her across the distance, her body supporting his own. Just wait, he wants to whisper to her. Just wait.
They pound the nail through Amadeo’s palm.
IN A MOMENT, PAIN, but for now he thinks, This is all wrong, and he has time to clarify the thought. I am not the Son. The sky agrees, because it doesn’t darken. Amadeo remembers Christ’s cry—My God, why hast thou forsaken me?—and he knows what is missing. It’s Angel who has been forsaken.
All at once he sees her. He is surprised by the naked fear on her face. It is not an expression he knows. And she feels not only fear—Amadeo sees that now—but pain, complete and physical. Nothing he can do will change this, and soon it won’t be just her suffering, but the baby, too.
Angel cries out and holds her hands aloft, offering them to him. This is when the pain makes its searing flight down his arm and into his heart. Amadeo twists in agony on the cross, and below him the people applaud.
NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS
FRANCES WAS PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE whose father was not the bus driver. Instead, she told herself, she was a girl alone in the world, journeying to the city. With every gesture, she pictured herself: turning the page of her book, tucking a sweaty lock of hair behind her ear, lifting her chin to gaze out the bus window. Except Frances wasn’t alone, and her father, evidently thinking she’d come along today for his company, kept calling back to her with boisterous cheer over the exertions of the engine.
“Broke down here in ’42, Francy.” He indicated the endless yellow grass, summer-dry and dotted with cows and the occasional splintered shed, and Frances sighed and lowered her book politely to meet his eye in the rearview mirror. “Had a busload of fellows all on their way to training at Fort Bliss. Every day for three years I picked up two, three boys from each town and brung them south.” He chuckled at the memory. “You wouldn’t believe how many ideas twenty ranch boys have about a bus engine.”
Not counting Frances, eleven passengers had boarded early that morning in Raton, many of them also heading to Santa Fe for the Fiestas. Frances’s father had offered each and every one of them a jolly greeting. “Glorious day, isn’t it?” “Got my girl with me.” “Getting off in Santa Fe? So’s my Frances.” Each time a lady boarded—three did—he took her bag and followed her to her seat and stowed it in the net above while she removed her gloves and arranged her purse. Then he stood aside with his bulk pressed into the seats to let other passengers by. Frances had found herself looking away from his sad, obsequious displays of friendliness, embarrassed.
The day of the breakdown must have been a good one for her father; it must have been a thrill to share in the camaraderie with fellows his own age, part of a brotherhood, if only until the gas line or distributor or whatever it was got fixed. Frances pictured him twenty years younger, standing among the uniformed boys, grinning and eager and tongue-tied. Pity and affection welled in her.
Frances hadn’t been born then, but she was aware that the war years must have been hard for him, strangers looking him up and down, wondering why he wasn’t in Europe or the Pacific. Frances had felt the shame herself as a child when kids at school talked about their fathers’ service. They’d traveled to incredible places, those fathers—Japan and Singapore, Italy, England, France—and they had souvenirs in their houses to prove it: flags, medals, a Nazi helmet, a tin windup rabbit found in the pocket of a drowned Jap.
“My dad was a conscientious objector,” Frances had said at school when she was eleven. “We’re pacifists.” She’d shrugged, regretful, smug. “We just don’t believe in fighting.” But she’d had to stop saying that when it got back to her mother, who’d pinched her hard on the upper arm.
“Do you know what it would do to your father to hear you spreading those lies? He isn’t a coward. He has a condition.”
The condition in question was a heart murmur, and, as far as Frances knew, the only ill effect he’d ever suffered was fainting once on the football field in high school. Now, nearly an adult, Frances no longer judged her father for those war years, but it did strike her as darkly amusing that, not trusting his heart to hold out in the army, someone saw fit to put her father in charge of a busload of civilians careening down the highway at fifty miles an hour.
Now, an hour and a half into the trip, the passengers were scattered throughout the baking bus, dozing against the windows or reading newspapers; across the aisle, a stout woman was crocheting something in pink acrylic. Even with the windows lowered, the air blowing through was hot and dry, and Frances was worried about the state of her hair, which she’d tied up in rags last night. She lifted the limp curls off her sweaty neck and shifted in her seat and tried to concentrate on Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The frieze upholstery was scratchy through the cotton lawn of her new dress.
Frances was sixteen years old and twitchy with impatience. If Frances’s life was to be a novel—as Frances fully intended—then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.
She’d spend the weekend with her aunt and cousin in their little stucco house on Marcy Street. Tonight they’d watch the burning of Zozobra, the enormous gape-mouthed effigy of Old Man Gloom, and then walk back to the Plaza for music and dancing that would last all night. And Saturday there’d be the Hysterical Parade and night dances at the La Fonda and the Legion Hall with mariachis imported all the way from Mexico. “We’ll be out until morning,” her cousin Nancy had assured her on the telephone. “We might not even go home then.” Frances believed it. A widow dying to remarry, her aunt Lillian was fun-loving and young-dressing, lax and indulgent of her teenage daughter, which was exactly why it had been such a feat for Frances to convince her mother to let her go.
“Lillian’s got absolute feathers for brains,” her mother had said again last night of her sister-in-law. “If having your husband drop dead before your eyes doesn’t pull you up short, I don’t know what will. Man crazy, the two of them. That girl’s going to end up in trouble, and Lillian will be too busy batting her own eyelashes to notice.”
“Mother,” Frances had said with superhuman forbearance, which was the only way she could bring herself to speak to her mother now. “Nancy’s not going to end up in trouble.” But Frances didn’t actually believe this, which was why Nancy was so appealing to be around, even if she was a year younger and made Frances feel dull and wholesome, an actual country cousin.
Frances was also hoping to see some beatniks and artists, who, Nancy had told her, lived in such unimaginable filth it would make you sick, and they actually liked it, didn’t even try to better themselves. “Ugh,” said Nancy. “A painter rents the shed behind my friend Sally’s neighbor’s house, and he’s so poor he trades his paintings for dog food. Sally says he eats the dog food right alongside the dog.”
Frances had somehow missed these characters in previous visits to the state capital, but apparently they came out in droves for the Fiestas, high on their drugs and flouting conventions left and right. Maybe one of these artists would take her back to his dingy house with the mattress on the floor and ask to paint her. Frances considered herself, like Tess, a vessel of emotion untinctured by experience, and Frances very much wanted to be tinctured.
So in preparation, she’d spent her carefully hoarded babysitting money on a new pink lipstick at Rexler’s and, at Barton’s, this emerald-green dress, with its low, square neck and matching belt. Frances was sorry that she hadn’t been able to afford a discreet weekend valise, too, powder-blue leather stamped to resemble alligator skin, like she’d seen in an ad for face cream in one of her mother’s magazines. Instead, she’d had to pack her clothes in her orange sun
-patterned swimming bag, embarrassing and childish and completely inappropriate for this weekend.
“Fancy-Francy, I ever tell you about the time a lady left a baby on the bus?”
Frances tamped down a surge of irritation, closed her book, and gave her father a tight, tolerant smile in the mirror. “You have.”
Of course he had. Twice a day for twenty years he’d driven the same dusty two hundred miles between Raton and Santa Fe, never even stepping off his bus to walk down the faded main streets of the towns he passed through. Every single day, the landscape changing in the same ways: deepening or rippling, shading greener here, flatter there, from high plain to chaparral to woodland plateau and back again, the vistas unbroken except for the occasional herd of antelope or deer or, more rarely, elk. Of course he’d told her about the baby.
“You’re kidding,” said the crocheting woman. “Blessed be.”
“Yep,” her father said with enthusiasm. “She gathered up all her packages and boxes, but left the baby.”
He told it again, how another passenger had discovered the baby fast asleep on the seat when they were only a few miles outside of Maxwell, how he’d slowed the bus, made an excruciating many-pointed turn on the empty blacktop highway, and drove back to the depot in town. They found the woman without much trouble; it was a small town, and the man behind the ticket counter pointed her out, sitting on a bench outside the station, surrounded by her luggage.
Frances could understand wanting to abandon a baby; the mystery was why the woman had only left it on a bus and not in the boondocks where no one would find it. Frances babysat, but just because there were things she needed: beautiful, transformative clothes, a typewriter, a powder-blue valise. Above all, Frances needed to get out of Raton for good. She wanted to go to college, to take her place among the fresh-faced young men and women at UNM, skirt swinging and books clutched to her chest, her face raised to the warm possibility of romance. This weekend was practice for the day when she would board this bus again and never return.
“My God,” said the woman. “She must have been out of her head with worry.”
“Claimed it was a mistake and practically tore that baby from my arms. But I’m not sure she convinced me, wasn’t crying or anything. Who’s to say she didn’t pull the same stunt on some other guy’s route?” Still, the story had a happy ending: “All that, and we arrived in Santa Fe only nine minutes behind schedule.”
It was an excellent story made stupid by his telling: for instance, when he’d told it the first time at dinner, it was the turn that had seemed to interest him most; he’d demonstrated on the tablecloth using his knife as the bus.
Frances looked at her father in the driver’s seat—his round, sloping shoulders, the stubble on the back of his neck. He held the big wheel with both hands as if it were a roasting pan. He used to be a frustrated man, a shouter and a spanker. But he’d mellowed as Frances got older. Now he sought her company with a sort of sodden sentimentality that left her at once touched and galled.
“Shame I can’t go with you,” her father called. “To the Fiestas. It would be nice to see Lillian, spend some time with you girls.”
Frances kept her eyes on her book, pretending not to have heard. The swell of power this gave her was like an electric charge.
“Would you look at that,” he tried again, sweeping his hand across the windshield. “You don’t get views like these from an office, Francy.”
“Daddy, I have to do some reading. For school.” She held her book up to the mirror and sighed dramatically. “I’ll just move back. You two enjoy your conversation.”
“Smart as a whip, my girl,” her father told the crocheting woman, but Frances could hear the hurt in his voice.
She stood, lifted down her bag, and as she did, her dress ripped at the armpit. From her new seat she examined the tear. “Goddamn it,” she muttered, digging in her swimming bag for her cardigan. Up front, her father had fallen silent, his shoulders hunched. He needed to get used to her absence, Frances reasoned, because soon she’d leave for college, and then what would he do? She’d be kind to him when she got off in Santa Fe. She’d tell him she loved him. Frances put on her cardigan, and then, hot, sat back and opened her book.
IN WAGON MOUND, three people boarded. A thin red-cheeked woman in a gray dotted sundress sat across the aisle from Frances, and a man swinging a lunch sack took the seat in front of her. He smiled from under a bristly caterpillar of a mustache. Frances, aware of his eyes on her, looked out the window at the road blurring below. She pictured herself: her slow blush, lashes lowered against her cheek.
“Whew. Hot, isn’t it?” The thin woman lifted off her straw hat, and her hair came with it, loosening from her chignon, then falling around her face in lank, damp strands. She pulled a pencil and a crossword from her purse and set to work.
All the while, Frances examined the man in her peripheral vision. He was sitting sideways, leaning against the window. He craned to see Frances over the backrest. Brown checked suit, agate bolo tie cinched tight under his collar. He was thirty, maybe. His hair was a little long, parted down the middle.
“Hey.” He stretched a narrow hand toward her, flicked her book. “Pretty girls should smile.”
People were always telling Frances to smile; apparently her face in its natural state was pinched and sulky. “Well, you aren’t beautiful,” her mother had said thoughtfully this summer. “But you’re perfectly fine when you smile.” Frances hated the implication that she ought to appear good-natured for someone else’s benefit. Who did this man—some ranch hand in his absurd city best—think he was? Still, he had called her pretty, and that was something. She raised an eyebrow in a way she hoped looked disdainful and queenly. “If I felt like smiling,” she said, “I would.”
He laughed, not unkindly. The man’s breath was damp and garlicky from, Frances imagined, some massive ranch breakfast eaten in a hot kitchen. Greasy yellow eggs, beans, fat sausages splitting their burned skins. The thought was nauseating, and Frances turned her head.
“You don’t make yourself sick, reading like that?”
Frances shook her head. She had absolutely no desire to talk to this man. She would not talk to this man. But her silence hung between them, unmistakable and rude. “No,” she said finally. “I never get carsick.”
“Lucky. I was in the Navy, and I never did get used to the seasickness.”
“Well,” said Frances, “it can’t help, sitting backward like that.” Rude, her mother would call her; Frances preferred spirited.
“What are you reading?”
What could Thomas Hardy possibly mean to him? Frances displayed the cover, feeling superior.
“So you’re a smarty-pants,” said the man. “Huh.”
Frances had begun Tess of the D’Urbervilles that summer with trepidation, and she was proud of herself for making it as far as she had. Even more than the story, Frances enjoyed the image of herself reading this fat book with its forbidding, foreign-sounding title. It was a prop, exactly the book a girl with a powder-blue valise would be reading. And apparently, as a prop it was working.
The fellow lit a cigarette, exhaled, still watching her. “I’m not much for reading. Myself, I’m a painter.”
Frances brightened and set the book in her lap. “Really? What do you paint? Figures?” She blushed.
“Nudes, you mean? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?”
Frances’s blush deepened. She didn’t deny it.
He laughed. “I’d say I’m more of an action painter.” He scratched his mustache with a finger, eyes on her, then took another drag.
Did that mean what she thought it meant? Was Frances being propositioned? He was thinking of her that way, wasn’t he? Certainly he wasn’t talking to the woman across the aisle. And why was that? Because the woman across the aisle was plain and had an entirely untended mustache. Frances ran her finger over her own upper lip, plucked last night in preparation for Santa Fe.
And no
w Frances wasn’t just a girl going into the world, but a girl whose virtue was being tested. That it might not withstand the test was a thrilling prospect. Frances suddenly felt deeply certain that something momentous would happen this weekend. Not with this fellow, though he really wasn’t bad-looking, despite his breath, and it was possible that the breath was just a result of his devil-may-care artistic lifestyle. Too many reefers, maybe.
Men in Raton utterly overlooked Frances. Only two boys had ever asked her on dates, both pitiful specimens still awaiting their growth spurts. And now what Frances had always suspected was true: She did have sex appeal. Under her bodice the life throbbed quick and warm.
Frances couldn’t wait to tell Nancy. Nancy was involved in endless drama with bevies of boys, while Frances, with her modest clothes and overprotective mother, had to play the supporting role to her younger cousin, probing for details, shaking her head in scandalized admiration, offering advice on matters she had absolutely no personal experience with. At least Frances lived in Raton; Nancy didn’t know how little she knew.
“Are you going to the Fiestas?” She smiled in a way she hoped was coy. “You must be, dressed like that.” Handsome, she probably should have said, but it really was a terrible suit.
“You’ll be there?” His green eyes—lovely eyes, now that she was looking—were bright and amused. Was he laughing at her? “Are you asking me out? Maybe you’d like to get a drink with me.”
Frances straightened her sweater; she wanted to remove it, show off her arms, but was aware of the hole in her dress. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Who knew she had it in her, this sauciness!
“You should be careful.” The painter twisted to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray, and Frances noted that his nails were clean. She would have thought he’d have paint around his cuticles. “You don’t know a thing about me.”
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 8